Far North (26 page)

Eben was cruel and blunt and practical. He called himself a Christian, but his real beliefs put him closer to the Tungus. There was no right in the first religions – no goodness to confuse the shamans, just the way things were done, just what served life and what didn’t. And no room for hypocrisy.

The prayers my father had offered were the prayers of the Pharisee. He spoke of god and sacrifice. But his god was his own vanity, and the sacrifice had turned out to be me.

 *

I crossed back into the Zone a few hours after dawn. The town was quite different with spring on it. The chestnut trees were in flower on the main streets, and the sidewalks seemed coated with a kind of sticky sap that had been thrown down from some of the branches. But in general, there was something sicklier and deader about Polyn in the summer. In winter, it had seemed frozen – or maybe asleep, like the princess in the fairy tale. But in summer, you could see she wasn’t just dead – her corpse was fly-blown.

It took me till early afternoon to find the place Shamsudin had told me about and I spent another hour fixing holds to the wall with the tools I’d brought with me. I tied a rope to one of them.

Then I squeezed myself though the broken window and dropped down into the basement.

It wasn’t exactly how Shamsudin had described it. The way he had told it, the storeroom was near the place he’d come in, but there was nothing like that near by. The chamber was much bigger than I’d expected – it was a walkway almost the size of a road t– noas lit with hidden skylights, and ways coming off it every ten yards or so. It was a labyrinth all right, but on the white tiles of the floor I could see traces of dirt and dried blood where Shamsudin had been before me, so I let him lead me down.

Following his prints was like tracking a wounded thing – the way they doubled back on themselves, went nowhere in particular, and seemed to rest exhausted in one place before continuing. They still told of his despair. The man who left these marks had only days to live, I thought. And as I followed him deeper into the labyrinth, I wondered how long I had, and I thought about the double-cross. I figured it was fifty-fifty that they’d shoot me on the bridge.

The storeroom was much deeper than he’d explained, down several ramps and staircases that he’d never mentioned. I doubt anyone else could have found it. Only someone who’d lost all hope of getting out by another way would have floundered this deeply into the building. Out of all the combinations of turns and corridors, he happened on this one. There was almost a divinity in that – until you remembered how he ended.

Deep, deep inside the bowels of that thing I found a bloody handprint head-high on a pair of double doors, and beyond those, the storeroom.

It was filled with rack upon rack of jars, filled with their flickering blue essence. They looked identical at first, but when you examined them more closely, you saw tiny variations in shape and design, until I wasn’t sure if there were even two the same.

I’ve been in some strange places in my life, but there was something about that room that was so unforeseen. It felt stranger than a tomb, like something divine, but in a religion unknown to me. I thought of the shaman dropping in on the bones of his ancestors. At that moment, if you’d told me that each one of those jars contained a human soul, I might have believed you.

I wasn’t minded to hang around in there. I put four in my bag and lit out.

 *

The prisoners at the base used to joke about ‘overfulfilling the plan’ – they said it when some newcomer to their team worked too hard and seemed likely to make them look bad. The first few times they’d say it as a joke, but if the person kept on digging or threshing as though his life depended it – usually in the hope of impressing the guards – then there might be a beating, or worse. Once, I saw a man have his toes taken off with a shovel. The long-term inmates knew it did you no favours to exceed expectations.

I was keen not to overfulfill the plan. There was easily a dozen plane-loads down in those stores, but it seemed to me that there would come a point when I’d brought out so much that they wouldn’t need me any more. If that happened, I guessed they’d cancel my ticket to Barrow.

 *

The evening light was melting back into caramel once again by the time I hit the avenue of chestnut trees and bent left onto the bridge. The sound of hooves and laughter echoed from a long way off along the concrete wall of the river, just as the gunshots did the time before.

I dismounted at the bridge approach and walked the last stretch to the block post. There were only two guards waiting. I slung my pack over the concrete division and let the guards spray it off.

I hitched the horse and dropped my tools on the city side of the block post, just how we agreed it. I had an uneaten apple in my pants from my lunch and I offered it to the horse. She nosed it uncertainly, her nostrils quivering. After a moment, she drew back her lips and bit. Then I started to undress, moving gingerly because of all the biting insects.

Pretty soon I was stood there naked, slapping away the mosquitoes from my naked flesh, waiting for the guards to call me across.

Gradually, more men started appearing to watch.

There was no sign of the spare clothes. If they’re going to kill me, they’ll do it now, I thought.

I heard a shout. Eben and Mr Apofagato were riding slowly back from the plane towards the bridge. The guards were waiting for a signal from him.

Eben rode loose and relaxed, letting the horse be his eyes and choose a path through the broken rubble. ‘How’d it go?’ he yelled.

‘I made a start,’ I said.

‘Only four, but they look like good ones,’ said the guard with the sack. He held one up in the sunlight. His eyes raked over my bare skin as he waited.

Eben pulled a rifle from his saddle.

‘There’s a lot more back in there,’ I said. ‘Maybe hundreds of them. But it’ll take time to winkle them out.’ My voice sounded thin and fearful. Somehow, to die naked in front of them felt like the biggest indignity of all.

Eben gestured with the rifle in the direction of my voice. ‘You’d better kill the horse, like we agreed,’ he said.

That was the maths of survival. Horses were plentiful. Letting one sicken and infect the rest was a risk not worth taking. They could breed another horse, but another Makepeace, who knew the lie of the city and where the flasks were hid, would take a lot longer to come by. At least, that’s what I banked on.

I stepped over the division. The guards sprayed me down with carbolic soap and handed me the change of clothes. The soap stung my eyes. I stepped into the pants and boots they’d given me. The boots were too big and my feet swam in them a little, but I was overtaken by a wave of relief so strong I felt like I might weep. The evening light seemed to hold the promise of so much life in it. I wanted to live for ever and cherish the beautiful things I’d seen. Polyn from the belly of that plane. The girl in her memory stone. The stillness of Evangeline without a soul in it. Looking up at the night sky crowded with pinpricks of light, I’d sometimes fancied I could see a Makepeace on another star, a different me, living her last days surrounded by grandchildren. In Alaska I would grow old. There would be time for other things. The life I’d missed. The pit of my belly swarmed with a radiant peace.

‘It seems a pity to shoot the horse,’ I said. ‘I was thinking I could use her tomorrow.’

Eben shrugged. ‘What does Apofagato say?’

Apofagato shook his head. ‘It can develop symptoms within twelve hours. I strongly advise against.’

‘You heard the man.’ Ebenflipped the gun in his hands and offered me its stock.

It was a beautiful old repeater with a lever on the underside of its barrel, at least a hundred years older than I was, with luminous grey metal and its wood almost the same shade of chestnut as the horse. I complimented him on it.Bill Evans had had one a lot like it. It took the same big shells he had used in his handgun.

‘It’s a Winchester,’ said Eben. ‘There’s a story behind it that I’ll tell you one day.’

The horse had a white star on her forehead. I sighted the gun on that and then lowered it again. ‘You might want to dismount in case they startle,’ I said.

Apofagato swung down out of his saddle onto the dust of the bridge, but Eben stayed put, cocksure as ever. ‘Don’t mind me, Makepeace,’ he said. ‘Just get it done. I want the other animals to stay clean.’

I squeezed the trigger. The gun cracked and kicked my shoulder, then the horse swayed, drawing up her front foot before she fell to the ground.

At the crack of the gun, Eben’s horse reared up and then slipped. For an instant he was fighting to stay on her. The two of them fell together in a blur of bodies, the horse twisting before she hit the ground. I thought at first Eben had broken his leg but he was back on his feet in a flash. Apofagato gathered the reins and was gentling the horse with his hand when Eben snatched them from him and yanked his crop from the saddle. He lashed at the animal. ‘You damn bitch,’ he cried, leathering her sides until her eyes rolled. It seemed like a few strokes would satisfy his anger, but his rage seemed to feed on itself, growing more savage, as though it had its roots elsewhere, in some ancient cruelty. The pain and the fear of pain made the guts of the horse tremble. He thrashed furiously, with an action that was suddenly so familiar I could almost hear the bedstead jingling. There was spit on his lips as they twisted into another curse. ‘You Jezebel!’

He turned to where he knew I was standing.

‘Give me the gun, Makepeace,’ he panted. ‘What you waiting for?’

Jezebel
. The word crackled through my memory like a splash of acid. There was a bird call back in the city I had just left, and the eddying water behind him seemed to freeze for a second. My feet in the borrowed boots moved awful slow as I stepped to my right to find the clean angle. I heard Bill Evans’s voice in my head coaching me to move into a firing position: move to your right, lead with your right leg – never cross over yourself.

Two of the guards were still laughing. One had turned away to light a smoke. Eben frowned at me, impatient for the gun.

I put two shells in him before he had a chance to raise his eyebrows and the second of them pitched him clean over the side of the bridge.

The current swept him under us in a moment. He seemed to be laying face down in the water. I picked off another guard as he went for his side-arm. The others were slack-jawed with disbelief. Apofagato surrendered his horse to me without a murmur.

8

I
HOPED TO
ride hard like I had the last time, but in the days that followed I got sick like never before.

I started to puke on the morning of the next day. I couldn’t eat or keep food down.

I thought at first it was the sickness we’d all feared, but it wasn’t anything I had picked up in the Zone, it was something I had caught off Shamsudin, the oldest disease of all.

It didn’t seem possible that such a hasty intimacy could amount to anything. A month had passed and I had thought nothing of it. I was getting on in years and had never been regular, with the food and hardship we had at the base, and every month I half-expected my body to have shut up shop. But it was more tenacious than that, like some crazy innkeeper, laying out fresh linen each night for guests that never come.

I passed across the face of the land as summer came and went. By the time I swung north for the last stretch, there was frost at night and the first green showing of the Lights.

The last few years of weather had broken up the highway and in places I had to pick my way slowly, or dismount. It didn’t matter to me. I was in no hurry. I had plenty to contemplate on my journey back.

I’d never known the north so beautiful as it was then. I’d find myself rapt by the tiniest things: a stripe in a stone, the blue crown on a honeysuckle berry – the ones the Russian prisoners called a zhimelost. I saw a tabby cat stalking through the long grass, wild offspring of some long-dead pet.It fled when it saw me – no memory of a human face. There was a tumbledown house near by. I crouched in its foundations to pee and found a four-leaf clover.

At other times in my life, I’d seen animals or plants that had no business there, but now I seemed to come across them every other day: a parrot once – a flash of bright green the colour of pondweed and its unmistakable beak. Another time a plum tree. And once – I swear – a monkey, its pink face fringed with a tiny lion’s mane, chattering its bared teeth at me from a silver birch.

I have no idea how they got there, but it took hold in my mind that they were salvaged from a busted ark. I pictured it to myself, split or run aground somewhere, and the animals freed from the wreck, breaking out of crates – a whole menagerie crawling and hopping north, tracing the route of the rivers that flowed to the cold.

For the first time in as long as I can think, I knew a kind of contentment. And for once, the world wasn’t a thing to fight against.

Rain was falling when I reached my city.

I was lucky to have the business end of a long summer ahead of me. I worked like a crazy thing to get some food in the ground and a spare room ready. By the time the first snow came, I was too big for the morning ride.

In fact, I was in the stable when it happened. I stayed on my feet throughout, clutching onto the tack pegs to keep up and terrifying the horses with my screams. It all went quicker than the first time. Just as I was finally doubling up in pain, out popped a fierce-looking little thing with a shock of black hair and the dark face of a Tungus, paddling with its limbs and squalling, and a cry more like a mew than a scream.

9

I
COUNTED THE BOOKS
I’ve saved the other day. There are 2,075 of them stacked up in the armoury and 177 that I’ve laid by in the house. I also counted sixteen boxes of candles that I’ve stashed in Charlo’s old bedroom. They’re packed a gross to a box, and if you keep the wicks trimmed they burn for just above two hours. Each box is twelve days of constant light. There’s something more than six months’ worth of them altogether.